I have no idea what Barack Obama thinks about Israel and the Middle East. I’m not sure he does either. It’s not something he would have given much thought to during the course of a career focused primarily on constitutional law and Chicago city politics. As Ralph Nader noted on “Meet the Press,” he seems to have been “pro-Palestinian” before he was pro-Israeli. But to label him anti-Israeli at heart based on the views of his foreign policy adviser Samantha Power is wrong.

My fellow CONTENTIONS blogger Noah Pollak claims Power “will advise” Obama to “repudiate America’s greatest ally in the Middle East” (i.e. Israel) while “appeasing its greatest enemy” (i.e. the Palestinians). I have read through all the evidence he has collected here, and I remain unconvinced.

Power can explain her views better than I can, but it seems to me that all Pollak has are some statements from her supporting an Israeli-Palestinian peace process and a dialogue with Iran. I am skeptical about the prospects of either initiative succeeding, but to be in favor of such policies hardly involves repudiating Israel.

Pollack also quotes her as somehow being in favor of imposing a settlement on the parties, presumably with an outside peacekeeping force. I think is a pipe dream because no outside nation will put its troops on the line to stop Palestinian terrorism, but again it’s hardly an anti-Israeli position. In fact ,many Israelis would favor the deployment of, say, a NATO force as part of a final settlement with the Palestinians.

I’ve known Power for six years and have never heard her say anything that I would construe as anti-Israel. In fact, at a December 2006 forum at Harvard’s Kennedy School at which we were both panelists, she rather forcefully dismissed a claim by a Jewish anti-Zionist in the audience who tried to equate Israeli policy with South African apartheid—a favorite trope of the hard left.

I don’t agree with Power on everything. In particular, I am astounded that someone who has campaigned so eloquently and rightly to stop genocide would advocate a troop pullout from Iraq that could very well result in a genocide. But I’ve also found Power to be one of the more reasonable, sane, and centrist foreign policy thinkers on the Democratic side. Her award-winning book A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide could have been written by a neocon.